Ballet’s men step out of the shadows

Ivan Putrov has danced a lot of princes in his time. Too many perhaps. The 19th-century classics remain a touchstone in the ballet repertory, with the man often required to provide little more than gallant support: doing the heavy lifting and moving with a muscular heft that contrasts with a woman’s lightness, detail and speed. But Putrov believes male dancers are now entering a golden age. “We have come out of the shadow of the ballerina,” says the former Royal Ballet principal. “Over the last 100 years, there has been a transformation. Men are no longer just princes – they can be anything.”

This is no small claim from someone who, as a boy, had no real desire to dance; his mother tricked him into auditioning for the Kiev ballet school. But the 31-year-old is so convinced of this sea change that he has programmed an (almost) all-male event, Men in Motion, which opens in London later this month. Putrov’s programme will span a century of choreography and boast an international cast, including Putrov, the Argentinian prodigy Daniel Proietto, and Sergei Polunin, the Royal’s 21-year-old wunderkind.

We meet in a rehearsal studio at Sadler’s Wells in London, where Putrov and Polunin are discussing their own experiences on the ballet stage. Dressed in jeans, they could pass for brothers: same broad forehead, same grey-green eyes, same floppy dark hair. The connections go deeper still, since both were born in Ukraine and trained in Kiev before coming to London.

I’m curious to know whether, as young boys, dance had seemed a natural vocation. In Britain, pockets of resistance remain to the idea of boys dancing, for all the impact of Billy Elliot and the success of performers such as Akram Khan. In the former USSR, however, it has always been a far more acceptable career for men. How did they get started? “My mother was a ballerina,” says Putrov. “My dad was a soloist in the same company and every other day I was in the theatre.” He wanted to be different, and even when he was awarded a place at the Kiev, spent his first year vowing that he would never set foot on stage. Still, he kept coming top of his class, and eventually bagged the coveted role of the child in the popular Ukraine ballet The Forest Song. “I could feel the audience, the music and that was it.”

A decade later, Polunin found himself in the same role. It took him even longer to fall for the magic of the stage, he says. His parents were very poor and his mother pushed him into dance, because “it was a way for me and my family to move on to a better life”. This notion was completely foreign to a boy from Kherson, a remote town in Ukraine. “In my city, ballet didn’t exist.” But he had done some training as a gymnast and the auditioning panel in Kiev recognised a raw talent.

Polunin looks sad for a moment. “I would have liked to behave badly, to play football. I loved sport. But all my family were working for me to succeed. My mother had moved to Kiev to be with me – we lived in one room together. There was no chance of me failing.” His determination eventually led to a scholarship with the Royal Ballet school at the age of 13. As he matured, he became less competitive, learning to appreciate the artistry of ballet. “Now I am much more interested in the emotion and the drama.”

Some of the men I have interviewed will admit to an envy of their female peers, who get to dance Giselle, Aurora, Odette/Odile. There have even been confessions of tutu-envy. Not these two. “I wouldn’t go through the agony of the pointe shoe,” grins Putrov. And even though, in those classics, the man does the lifting and has far less material to dance, both claim the experience can be liberating. While women have to perform their solo variations just as the choreographer decrees, men are allowed to deliver their own preferred versions of pirouettes or leaps.

Polunin says there are few physical thrills to compare with the exhilaration of soaring up into the apex of a huge leap. “When you’re going a bit higher than you think you normally can, and you can feel the adrenaline and excitement of the public, that’s really great.”

They say there are more than enough works in the 20th and 21st-century repertories that allow a “man to be the equal of the woman, or even more important”. Ballets by MacMillan or Ashton offer complicated, funny or powerful male characters; there are moments in works by Wayne McGregor where the sexual coding diminishes almost to vanishing point.

Putrov dates the start of this expansion to a precise moment in 1911, when “Vaslav Nijinsky made himself a legend by jumping through the window in Spectre de la Rose”. In that work, by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, Nijinsky was an exquisite, perfumed, hovering creature. Off stage, he was also Diaghilev’s lover. It was Diaghilev’s eye for male beauty that encouraged the creation of so many ballets in which men were placed centre stage and allowed to dance with as much sensuality and poetry as women. As Putrov points out: “Men were liberated on stage at the same time that women were given the vote.”

Despite the Diaghilev revolution, it can still be hard for dancers to escape the type casting of traditional ballet. Polunin points to all those moments that, for him, have transcended those norms – among them, the tender, tempestuous and vulnerable chemistry he discovered with Tamara Rojo last year, when they danced Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand together.

In his 12 years at the Royal Ballet, Putrov became a virtuoso of polished finesse: his jumps were a flash of steel, a rush of displaced air. Two of the most important roles of his career have ranged far outside macho parameters: the naively romantic Lensky in John Cranko’s Onegin, and Pierrot Lunaire, the moonstruck modernist clown in Glen Tetley’s 1962 setting of the Schoenberg score. It’s this range Putrov has tried to reflect in Men in Motion, which begins with Spectre and closes with Russell Maliphant’s 2009 modern dance solo AfterLight; in between, there is Narcisse (danced by Polunin), a solo by the Soviet choreographer Goleizovsky, and Ashton’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits.

Putrov has also choreographed a new work, his first significant creation for the ballet stage. Titled Ithaca, after the Cavafy poem, and set to Paul Dukas’s La Peri, it’s a ballet he is too modest – and too apprehensive – to talk about, beyond enthusing about the set, by the artist Gary Hume.

Putrov has no plans, he says, to switch to choreography full-time. On the contrary, he plans to dance for as long as his body allows – another aspect, he says, of the good times men are enjoying. “We can perform for so much longer now. Dancing may be hard on us physically: when we jump, the joints take all the impact. We use our bodies to an extreme, like athletes. But an athlete burns out when he is about 25. A dancer, if he has good schooling, can go on for much longer. The career has changed.”